Adopting the colonizer’s language signals an intensified inferiority complex among the educated

Evidence

What is the origin of this personality change? What is the source of this new way of being? Every dialect is a way of thinking, Damourette and Pichon said. And the fact that the newly returned Negro adopts a language different from that of the group into which he was born is evidence of a dislocation, a separation. Professor D. Westermann, in The African Today (p. 331), says that the Negroes’ inferiority complex is particularly intensified among the most educated, who must struggle with it unceasingly. Their way of doing so, he adds, is frequently naive: “The wearing of European clothes, whether rags or the most up-to-date style; using European furniture and European forms of social intercourse; adorning the Native language with European expressions; using bombastic phrases in speaking or writing a European language; all these contribute to a feeling of equality with the European and his achievements.” — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 97

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s question about the psychology of locally vs. externally educated colonial subjects — the returned Negro’s language shift as evidence of dislocation. — connects to: Educated colonial subjects suffer intellectual alienation unlike exploited laborers’ alienation; Educated colonials who adopt radical thought are charged with ingratitude; A colonized intellectual living in Europe acquires Europe’s racist unconscious (+21 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the markers of the inferiority complex in educated colonial subjects via Westermann’s list.

Broader Connections

• Educated colonial subjects doing well assimilating get punished with inferiority when rejected #qualifies (0.70) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 343
• Learning another group’s dialect to pass as them constitutes alienation #corroborates (0.70) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 145
• Society’s racist structure creates and perpetuates the colonized patient’s inferiority complex. #corroborates (0.65) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 360
• Colonial officials used language hierarchy to justify claims of Indigenous mental inferiority #expands (0.60)